Alex Sturrock's Incredible Street Photos Show the London You Rarely See

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Alex Sturrock's Incredible Street Photos Show the London You Rarely See

He might be one of his generation's greatest street photographers.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If you don't already follow Alex Sturrock on Instagram, you probably should. In his professional life as a photographer he shoots some exceptional portraiture and reportage, and has been working with VICE UK pretty much since we started over a decade ago. There are too many of those stories to link out to from here, but a couple of our favorites are his portraits of ASBO recipients from 2007, and a more recent project on the residents of Britain's most beleaguered seaside town.

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On Instagram, Alex has been posting some of the best street photography we've seen in years. He sent us a few of those photos for the gallery below, and a couple of paragraphs explaining how the whole project came about:

I basically looked back at my work and decided that I only liked one photo I had ever taken. It was an image of two friends, one black and one white. They were in their early teens, and one had gone through puberty and was a couple of feet taller than the other. There was something about their bond that interested me, but also the fact that physically they were very different. It was essentially a street photo that I'd taken without any agenda other than my own. So I decided I wanted to go all out for a while doing work like that.

I've spent a lot of time in Finsbury Park and on Seven Sisters Road. It's a place that throws up contradictions—there's a massive church and two mosques, and a number of synagogues down the road in Stamford Hill. People wear traditional, restrained religious outfits, and that gets mixed in with modern clothing in all their lurid colors. It's eastern and western and old and new at the same time. But I do also like to travel around. I like going somewhere new and finding that it contradicts all the ideas that you've built up in your head about it. A wise woman once said, "It's what I have never seen before that I recognise." And that's what's really exciting—finding something familiar in something alien.

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Follow Alex on Instagram here, and head to Offprint London—a publishing fair held in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall from tomorrow until Monday May 25—to see (and buy) a selection of photos from this series.